It’s truly the nasty season in politics, as the Obama campaign has launched some blistering attacks against future Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, the controversial private equity firm he built and led from 1985 to 1999—or longer, depending on whom you ask.

A report last week in The Boston Globe gave Team Obama new fodder by pointing out that documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show Romney as president and chief executive officer of Bain as late as 2002. He has repeatedly claimed he stepped down in February 1999 to turn around the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

The timing matters, because some of the business failures and outsourcing of jobs among companies owned by Bain occurred during that period. So, if Romney was truly responsible for that, it would seriously undermine his case as a “Mr. Fix It” for the ailing US economy.

If you’re signing an SEC document…that you’re the president, CEO, chairman of the board and 100 percent owner of a company, in what world are you living in that you’re not in charge? If he wasn’t the head of it, who was?

On the same show, Romney campaign advisor Kevin Madden fired back:

During that transition from 1999 to 2002 where there was transfer of ownership to the new partners of Bain, that there was a duty to sign those documents. But…Governor Romney left Bain in 1999.

…Mitt was gone. We had a management team that was working hard to manage the company. We had to negotiate the terms of Mitt’s departure, and in fact everybody’s departure at that time, and it was difficult to get any time for Mitt to even get him and his attorneys to do that, because he was so busy working on the Olympics.

We reaffirm our conclusion that Romney left the helm of Bain Capital when he took a leave of absence in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics– as he has said repeatedly—and never returned to active management.

Romney took a leave from Bain in 1999, probably had a bit of contact with Bain’s management during the next few years, and was involved in both strategic and daily decision making only tangentially. In other words, not very involved, but not quite zero, either.

Sounds right to me. I’ve worked with many SEC documents and what’s in black and white is often only part of the story. It also wasn’t the MO of the hyper-driven Romney to spread himself too thin; he had been there, done that with Bain, and the Olympics was his nearly exclusive focus at the time—and a perfect jumping-off point for a 2002 gubernatorial campaign.

It’s fair game for the Obama campaign to hammer Romney about his business practices at Bain and whether it qualifies him for the presidency. And it’s working, big time, so they’re not likely to drop this theme.

But it’s really stretching it to label Romney a possible felon or a liar for simply stating his legal obligations at the time. Romney may be many things, but reckless he isn’t, although the more strident charges by Cutter and Team Obama certainly are, given what we know. The president should tell his people to dial it back a bit.

4 Responses to Team Obama Has Gone Too Far on Bain

Finally, finally, after what seems like an eternity a national Democrat picks up a hardball and actually throws it at Romney and the Republicans. It must have been a direct hit because the “fairness” people are upset. Where were the “fairness” people during the Willie Horton ads against Dukakis or the Swift boat attacks against Kerry? Welcome to the great Democratic party reasserting itself in the national debate after a generation of kowtowing to the Republican agenda. The only thing I want to see change is to see this energy being used to pass the Democratic agenda and not just save Obama.

David: A lot of Democrats I talk to feel the same way you do, but Bill Clinton, James Carville and Paul Begala also had the instinct for the jugular.

I thought the Swift Boat campaign was disgraceful, far worse than the Obama attacks on Bain, and Bain is fair game. But this \”lying\” and \”felony\” stuff is way off base, so I\’ll call \’em as I see \’em.